Black Pepper Explained: Cambodian vs Kampot Pepper

The last three words on one of our menu lines are easy to read past. Under Small Plates at Hamilton Road: “KIBBEH NAYYEH — margra lamb tartare, shio kombu, wheat, wasabi ponzu vinaigrette, crispy things, salted cambodian black pepper.” We have written about the kibbeh nayyeh itself and about the shio kombu on it. The pepper has never had more than a passing mention, and it deserves one, because “Cambodian” is doing more work in that line than it looks.

So this is the pepper post: what black pepper actually is, why black, white, green and red are one plant, what makes it hot and what makes it smell, why Cambodia is a famous name in pepper — and why “Cambodian” on our menu does not mean what a pepper enthusiast might assume.

One vine, four colours

Black pepper is the fruit of Piper nigrum, a woody climbing vine native to South or Southeast Asia — possibly including the Malabar Coast of India, where it is still grown extensively and wild pepper survives in the Western Ghats. The fruit is a small drupe, about 5mm across when ripe, with one seed inside. Almost everything you have ever ground over a plate is that fruit, handled four different ways:

Black pepper is the still-green, unripe fruit, cooked briefly in hot water and then dried. The heat ruptures the cells and speeds up the browning, and the skin shrinks into the thin, wrinkled black layer you know.
Green pepper is the same unripe fruit, dried in a way that keeps it green — freeze-drying, canning or sulphur dioxide — or pickled in brine or vinegar.
White pepper is the ripe fruit with the outer layer removed, usually by soaking the berries in water for about a week until the flesh softens and rots, then rubbing it off and drying the bare seed.
Red pepper is ripe fruit preserved in brine and vinegar, or dried with the same colour-saving methods as green.

Pink peppercorns are not on the list because they are not pepper at all. They come from the Peruvian and Brazilian pepper trees, which belong to the cashew family — which matters if you have a tree-nut allergy. And the chilli “pepper” borrowed the name in the sixteenth century without being related either. The word itself runs back through Old English pipor, Latin piper and Greek, most likely from Sanskrit.

What makes it hot, and what makes it smell

Pepper’s heat is piperine, found in both the outer fruit and the seed. Black pepper is somewhere between 4.6 and 9.7% piperine by weight. It is a different kind of heat from a chilli’s: refined piperine is only about one per cent as hot as capsaicin, gram for gram, which is why pepper prickles rather than burns.

The smell is a separate story, and it lives mostly in the skin. The outer layer that black pepper keeps carries terpenes — limonene, pinene and others — that give citrusy, woody and floral notes, and those are largely missing from white pepper because the skin has been soaked off. The signature peppery aroma is credited to a compound called rotundone, which turns up in marjoram, rosemary, basil and thyme, and in some Shiraz wines. (Our wine card carries two bottles with Syrah in the blend; the Chateau Haut Blanville is printed as “Ripe berries, spice, smooth and generous body”. Make of that what you will — the full list is in our wine-with-mezze guide.)

All of that is fragile. Pepper loses aroma by evaporation, faster once ground, and light can turn piperine into a nearly tasteless compound. That is the whole case for a pepper mill and an airtight jar, and for grinding at the last moment.

The spice that moved the map

Black pepper has been part of Indian cooking since at least 2000 BCE. The ancient Malabar port of Muziris shipped it to the Roman Empire, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant and Yemen, and the Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius uses pepper in most of its recipes. It reached China as hujiao, “foreign pepper”. In the Middle Ages its price and Venice’s grip on the trade helped push the Portuguese to find a sea route to India; when Vasco da Gama’s men reached Calicut in 1498 and were asked why they had come, the reply recorded was “we seek Christians and spices”.

Today it is ordinary. World production of black peppercorns was 855,105 tonnes in 2023, with Vietnam growing about 30% of it, and pepper accounts for around a fifth of the world’s spice trade.

Singapore was a pepper island once

Closer to home: pepper was one of this island’s first cash crops. According to the National Library Board’s Infopedia, there were about 20 gambier plantations here when the British arrived in 1819, and when a group of mostly European enthusiasts started experimenting with crops in 1836, gambier and pepper were the only two found viable. They were always grown together, because gambier waste was the fertiliser the pepper vines needed. By the late 1840s there were 600 gambier and pepper plantations employing some 6,000 Chinese labourers, many in the north around Nee Soon and the Seletar River; Seah Eu Chin, the “king of gambier”, had large holdings along Upper Thomson Road, Sembawang and Mandai.

It did not last. Within about fifteen years the soil was exhausted, and from the late 1840s the plantations moved to Johor; by around 1905 the planters had turned to pineapple and rubber. A plantation of this kind was called a bangsal, and it is a strange thought, sitting in Jalan Besar, that the island once grew the thing we now import.

Why Cambodia, and why we do not say “Kampot”

Cambodia’s pepper reputation rests on one name: Kampot pepper, a cultivar of Piper nigrum grown in seven districts across Kampot and Kep provinces in the south-west, in the foothills of the Elephant Mountains. It was described as early as the thirteenth century by the Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan. Intensive production began under French colonial rule in the 1870s — it was sold as poivre d’Indochine — and in the early twentieth century Cambodia harvested around 8,000 tonnes a year. The civil war almost erased it: by the late 1990s the harvest was about 4 tonnes. Farmers drifted back in the 2000s, and in 2010 Kampot pepper became the first Cambodian product to win geographical-indication status, followed by protection in the European Union in 2016. Only accredited members of the producers’ association may sell under the name, and it is produced in all four colours from the same vines. Even revived, it is small: around 80 tonnes in 2020.

Here is the part that matters for reading our menu. Kampot is a tiny fraction of Cambodian pepper. By the end of May 2016 Cambodia had produced 11,819 tonnes of black pepper that year, and about 72% of it came from Tbong Khmum province, nowhere near Kampot. So “Cambodian black pepper” and “Kampot pepper” are not the same claim. Our menu says Cambodian. It does not say Kampot, and we are not going to upgrade it on the blog. Nor does it say what “salted” means — whether the pepper is seasoned with salt at the pass or arrives as a salted product. If either detail matters to you, ask the floor team; they will check with the kitchen.

Why it belongs on a raw lamb dish

What we can explain is the logic, because it follows from everything above. A tartare is not cooked, so nothing on it is being heated through; the pepper’s aroma — the volatile, fragile part — reaches you as it is, rather than being cooked out. Black rather than white keeps the skin, and with it the citrus-and-wood notes, which sit well beside the citrus in the ponzu vinaigrette.

The other spice on our Middle Eastern shelf that tends to surprise people is a sour one — sumac, also from the cashew family, which reaches the table in Li’l Habibi’s fruit tart. And if you want the rest of the cheese-and-pantry thread, our burrata explainer and our labne post are the places to go next. The story of how all of these ended up on one menu starts in five years of Habibi-san.

The kibbeh nayyeh is on the full menu under Small Plates. To try it, book a table at 29 Hamilton Road — open Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm. We serve pork and alcohol, so Habibi-san is not halal.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Black pepper” and “Kampot pepper”, read 2 October 2026; National Library Board Singapore, Singapore Infopedia, “Gambier” (Naidu Ratnala Thulaja), read 2 October 2026. Menu and wine-card wording quoted from the live Habibi-san PDFs, checked unchanged on 2 October 2026.